Although perhaps problematic
in its own right, a more effective conceptualisation of security recognises
that the very process of ‘securitising’ oneself from another entity is a
process of both frontier and norms formation. In order to securitise, one must
locate and distinguish oneself from the threat in linguistic terms so to name
it as such. In this manner, the ‘Copenhagen School’ of security studies and
international relations theory provide a consistent account of ‘security’ as a mutually
constructive phenomenon with norms, values and language, which are all formed
in the public ‘inbetweeness’ of peoples. ‘Securitisation’ therefore becomes
more than ‘security from other humans, human groupings or human-based agents’,
but rather “constituted by the intersubjective establishment of an existential
threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political effects”.[2] This conceptualisation
allows us an inclusive and phenomenal grasp of securitisation that centres its
focus on intersubjectively formulated existential threats with socio-political
consequences, be this threat human - through ideological contestation, terrorism or nuclear proliferation –
environmental - such as the Climate Emergency - or even epidemiological - as
the current COVID-19 (C19) pandemic is.
As the year of C19 comes
to a close, many will be reflecting on the odd character of the past twelve
months as a result of the pandemic. For those who may question the status of C19
as a security concern in the first instance, according to the C19 dashboard (CSSE)
by John’s Hopkins University, the cumulative total number of global deaths from
the virus to date (31st December 2020) is 1,806,478.[3] How does this relate to
other pressing security matters, at least as far as the number of deaths is
concerned? Consider deaths from Terrorism as a comparative measure, for example.[4] With its definitional
emphasis on terrorism as violent or threatening action undertaken by non-state
agents, between 2000 and 2017 the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) recorded
271,464 deaths globally as a result of terrorist activity.[5] This means that since its
outbreak in late 2019, C19 has killed over six-times the number that terrorist
attacks did in the seventeen years between 2000 and 2017. One of the biggest
disparities, however, is the securitisation of terrorism, experienced since the
beginning of the Global War on Terror (GWoT), and that of C19.
When a security concern
is acknowledged by a number of states as being a collective threat, one that a
number of sovereign agents have both internally and externally
intersubjectively constructed as a common existential threat, it becomes what
the Copenhagen School thinkers Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver have coined as a
‘Macrosecuritisation’. In their own words, this is the: “identification of an
existential threat to a valued referent object and the call for exceptional
measures”, differing other securitisations in that “they are on a larger scale
than mainstream collectivities in the middle [level of analysis] (states,
nations) and seek to package together securitisations from that level into a
‘higher’ and larger order”.[6] Thus, when a security
threat is held in common by states, an order based upon security emerges.[7] The GWoT is a good
illustration of this. In the case of a common threat that is state-centric,
what Buzan and Wæver explicate is the notion of ‘security constellations’,
where threat becomes mirrored and mutually constructive with the referent object
of securitisation. A good example of this is, naturally, the Cold War. Here The
United States (US), alongside its allies and institutions of collective
security (e.g. NATO), and The Soviet Union (USSR), with its allies and institutions
of collective security (e.g. The Warsaw Pact), constructed one another as their
primary existential security concern – magnetising other sovereign entities within
their sphere of influence into this web of threat to form an ordered structure
grounded on security – i.e., a ‘constellation’.
These constellations of macrosecuritisation
rely primarily on certain notions of all-encompassing universalisms. Buzan and
Wæver lay out four categories of universalisms that underpin
macrosecritisations: ‘Inclusive’, ‘Exclusive’, ‘Existing Order’, and finally,
‘Physical Threat’. I do not want to go through all four, but for the purpose of
understanding: ‘Inclusive universalisms’ include ideological or religious
beliefs that wish to optimise the human condition and are applicable to all
humankind; ‘Exclusive universalisms’ are ideological beliefs that claim
superior rights and status for a single group over humankind; ‘Existing Order
universalisms’ concern threats to the institutions of the international order
as whole, which can overlap with ‘Inclusive universalisms’ but could come as a
result of common state interest (for example, the rise of transnational groups
that can undermine sovereignty); and finally, ‘Physical Threat universalisms’,
which, in Buzan and Wæver’s own terms, refer to: “claims about dangers that
threaten humankind on a planetary scale” such as the climate crisis, the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, or diseases – they effect the physical fate
of humanity as a whole.[8]
This fourth category of,
with its connection to securitisation against disease as is referent object,
brings us neatly back to C19. Acknowledging that the virus has killed in one
year alone over six times the number that global terrorism did in seventeen, at
the height of the GWoT, has the language of macrosecuritisation at the global
level been effective, prudent or concentrated enough to respond to the global
physical threat on the same, global, level? My claim is that it has not. One
way we can evaluate this question is the extent to which the language utilised
in the resolutions of The United Nations (UN) overtly discusses C19 in a frame
of macrosecuritisation, or not, in relation to a past speech acts and linguistics.
In resolution S/RES/1368
(2001), adopted by the UN Security Council (UNSC) on the 12th
September 2001, there was, naturally, a clear referent object of threat
determined by all members of the UNSC, regarding “such acts, like an act of
international terrorism, as a threat to international peace and security”. This
is a clear speech act of macrosecuritisation. In the utterance of this
recognition, the UNSC referred to the threat of international terrorism as a
threat to global security, an utterance of intersubjective commonality that
changed the ontological condition of the phenomenon from localised security
concerns to one that is common to all – a macrosecuritisation. Do we see the
same for C19?
If we look at the
resolutions passed by both the General Assembly (UNGA) and the UNSC in 2020,
there is evidence to claim this affirmatively. In A/RES/74/270, passed on the 3rd
April 2020, the UNGA recognised “the unprecedented effects of the pandemic,
including the severe disruption to societies and economies, as well as to
global travel and commerce, and the devastating impact on the livelihood of
people”, whilst equally expressing “optimism that the unprecedented crisis
caused by the COVID-19 pandemic can be mitigated and successfully reversed
through leadership and sustained global cooperation and solidarity”. By the
passing of A/RES/74/306
on the 15th of September, the language utilised by the UNGA became
more overtly macrosecuritisational, expressing that the task of the UN was to “work
for peace and focus on the world’s common battle to defeat COVID-19”.[9] In the use of the term
‘battle’ we saw the first use of military language in describing the
necessities of securitisation against the virus, perhaps acknowledging the
existential threat C19 poses commonly to all. However, these are the utterances
of the UNGA, where has the Security Council stood, being the central
body of global security recognition and the primary plane on which security
constellations become observable phenomenon.
In the single UNSC
resolution concerned exclusively with C19, S/RES/2532, put to the
council by France and Tunisia and passed on July 1st 2020, the
council recognised: “that conditions of violence and instability in conflict
situations can exacerbate the pandemic, and that inversely the pandemic can
exacerbate the adverse humanitarian impact of conflict situations”, whilst
clearly laying out the stakes of a weak internationalist response to the crisis
by recognising: “that the peacebuilding and development gains made by countries
in transition and post-conflict countries could be reversed in light of the
COVID-19 pandemic outbreak”. Finally, in this resolution there was a coherent
affirmation of the security threat that C19 poses in the consideration “that
the unprecedented extent of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to endanger the
maintenance of international peace and security”.
In the discussion that
accompanied this resolution, Antonio Guterres (The Secretary-General of the UN)
laid out how vulnerable, developing and post-conflict states face the reversal
of security in the face of C19, such as in the Darfur region of Sudan where C19
has exacerbated efforts to forge and build a sustainable peace agreement,
fanning the conflict despite the call for a global ceasefire, and how the
effect of the pandemic may aid terrorist organisations.[10] Additionally, we can
observe the work that the UN has done in its humanitarian work to ease the
effects of the pandemic within those areas susceptible to ‘security
backsliding’ and how it has done this without the collective funding it
requires to achieve its aims of de-escalating such backsliding.[11] Nonetheless, this is not as strong a
securitisation as observed in the past. The resolution here is lacking
resoluteness, affirming only a likelihood of concern despite that by
this point, in July 2020, there were already some half a million deaths
worldwide – almost double that due to terrorism between 2000 and 2017.
The optimism that is
expressed by the UNGA that the UN can successively act to mitigate the
existential threat of the pandemic at the global level reveals two premises as
we enter 2021, either (a) that the international effort has been weak and
unsuccessful, or that (b) there has yet to be a common response at the global
level. In either case, we can see that, despite the effort of the UN in its
formal documental linguistics and humanitarian aid, the UNSC and UNGA have yet
to award C19 its proper status as a macro-security threat, which, as Buzan and Wæver
(2009) claim, mobilise a greater effort in the name of global security in the
same way that occurred during the Cold War or as with GWoT. Indeed, what
appears in all of these resolutions by the UNGA and UNSC is the foremost
concern that its own targets towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development are hampered, as opposed to the immediate human cost and loss of
life from the pandemic itself.[12] This agenda is of the
uttermost concern, with its seventeen goals that includes ending hunger and
poverty for instance, which are noble causes that the UN should strive to
achieve as the basis of its remit in The UN Charter.
However, its immediate response to successfully mitigating the C19 crisis
required more than just a recognition of the likelihood that international
security would be endangered. Even as late as the 21st December
2020, resolution S/RES/2558
on ‘Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace’ devoted a single paragraph to C19 in
which the UNSC stressed the full implementation of its earlier July resolution
(S/RES/2532) and only emphasised the effect that C19 would have on the 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development. This is not a success, and the lack
of coordination towards an international response has only served to exacerbate
the requirement for greater humanitarian action.
As 2020 comes to an end, by looking at the graph below in the appendix, what we can see are the number of deaths related to C19 in each member state of the UNSC. The total figure on the 27th December 2020 came to 627,207 in these states alone. An approach from the UNSC that is rooted in a common recognition of C19 as the existential security threat it is, as the GWoT or the Cold War was, in the linguistic frame of a macrosecuritisation, may in turn provide the construction of the common response that so often flows from the common recognition of a security threat that endangers all. It is not enough to simply recognise a common security threat alone. To succeed against it is to provide a common response – and this can only be achieved through the intersubjective process of macrosecuritisation. Until then, sadly, 2021 will be much like 2020.
Appendix
[1] Strand, Håvard, Siri Aas Rustad,
Henrik Urdal and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård (2019) ‘Trends in Armed Conflcit,
1946-2018’, Conflict Trends, (3), Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo,
pp. 1-4.
[2] Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, Japp de
Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework For Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, Inc., p. 25.
[3] COVID-19 Data Repository by the
Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University
(2020) ‘COVID-19 Dashboard’, coronavirus.jhu.edu, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
(Accessed 31st December 2020 at 10:42).
[4] I know that the two are difficult
to compare, but I am concerned with just the existential threat of the
phenomena – irrespective of the context or material of that phenomenon itself.
[5] Referenced in: Hannah Ritchie, Joe
Hassell, Cameron Appel and Max Roser (2019) ‘Terrorism: Deaths From 1970-2017 -
World’, taken from Global Terrorism Database (2018), Our World in Data,
ourworldindata.org, https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism (Accessed 31st
December 2020). For a discussion of the issues concerning the methodology of
the Global Terrorism Database, see: Gary LaFree, Laura Dugan and Erin Miller
(2015) Putting Terrorism in Context: Lessons From The Global Terrorism
Database, Abingdon: Routledge, p. 22.
[6] Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver (2009)
‘Macrosecuritisations and Security Constellations: Reconsidering Scale in
Securitisation Theory’, Review of International Studies, 32(2), pp.
253-276, p. 257.
[7] My initial thought here was to
return to Kenneth Waltz, and his Structural Realist assertion that: “The goal
the system encourages them [states] to seek is security. Increased power may
not serve that end”, in Kenneth H. Waltz (1979) Theory of International
Politics, New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., p. 126. Although not Structural
Realists, what we see with Buzan and Wæver’s concept of ‘Macrosecuritisation’
is the creation of an order based upon the response to an external threat by a
number of states that have constructed this threat in common. Thus, as power
does not necessarily rid one of the threat, an engagement with common interest
is adopted, adjusting the structure of the order to some degree in the name of common
or collective security. Perhaps this is where Waltz and Liberal
Internationalism can be fused, at least on this purely structural notion?
[8] Buzan and Wæver (2009)
‘Macrosecuritisations and Security Constellations’, pp. 260-261.
[9] Emphasis added.
[10] UN Web TV (2nd July
2020) ‘Maintenance of international peace and security: Implications of
COVID-19 - Security Council Open VTC’, webtv.un.org, http://webtv.un.org/search/maintenance-of-international-peace-and-security-implications-of-covid-19-security-council-openvtc/6168956136001/?term=&lan=english&cat=Security
%20Council&page=20 (Accessed 1st January 2020). This point is
also made in A/RES/74/306 on p. 4.
[11] The United Nations (September
2020) United Nations Comprehensive Response to COVID-19: Saving Lives,
Protecting Societies, Recovering Better, New York: The United Nations, https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/
files/un-comprehensive-response-to-covid-19.pdf (Accessed 1st
January 2020)
[12] The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was passed in 2015 through resolution A/RES/70/1.